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Make America Healthy Again Commission Report Released – CPDA Deep Dive
Last week, the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Commission released its initial assessment of the nation’s health, with a focus on children. The assessment suggests environmental chemicals, including pesticides, may contribute to chronic childhood diseases such as autism, cancer, and autoimmune disorders. The assessments also highlight ultra processed foods (UPFs), lack of exercise and overmedicalization as other risk factors affecting the health of children.
For pesticides, the MAHA report highlights countries with stricter pesticide regulations as examples of better health outcomes. They also recommend greater scrutiny of pesticide residues on food and exploration of federal actions to reduce agricultural chemical exposure.
All of this might sound familiar to those industry veterans over the age of fifty-five. In 1993, the National Research Council published the book Pesticides in the Diets of Infants and Children, which examined “whether the present regulatory approaches adequately protect infants and children, who may differ from adults in susceptibility and in dietary exposures to pesticide residues.” Congress took note of the recommendations in the book and three years later unanimously passed the Food Quality Protection Act of 1996, which contained many of the recommendations in the book.
FQPA completely overhauled how pesticides were assessed and approved, while establishing additional protections for infants and children.
Key provisions include:
Special protections for infants and children: FQPA required EPA to consider the potential risks to infants and children and apply additional safety factors (often a tenfold increase) when assessing exposures to kids.
Reassessment of existing tolerances: EPA was required to re-evaluate all existing pesticide tolerance levels within 10 years to ensure they were protective of children.
Cumulative and aggregate exposure: FQPA required EPA to consider the combined effects of exposure to multiple pesticides with similar mechanisms of toxicity, as well as exposure from various sources (food, water, etc.).
Fast forward to today and, according to the MAHA report, we have made no progress since 1996 – pesticides are still one of the main culprits affecting the health of children. But let’s have a closer look at that.
The report tells us that “nearly 70% of an American child’s calories today comes from ultra-processed foods.” This staggering number has led to dramatic increases in obesity and diabetes among children. One thing is for sure. Kids are not overweight due to a diet rich in fruit and vegetables. Instead, they are overweight because they rarely eat fruits and vegetables. A recent Centers for Disease Control report confirms this. The report found that nearly one-third of children aged 1-5 do not eat a daily fruit, and nearly half do not eat a daily vegetable.
On top of that, we also know from USDA’s Pesticide Data Program that over 99% of the foods sampled by USDA were well below safety limits set by the EPA with 40% having no detectable residues at all. So, how can kids be exposed to pesticides in their diets when they don’t routinely eat their fruits and vegetables and when they do, residues are either nonexistent or present at very low levels? That’s a question the MAHA Commission needs to answer.
To encourage healthier diets for kids, we need a renewed national focus on diets rich in fruit and vegetable consumption. To do that, we first need a regulatory system that provides the crop protection tools farmers need to produce a wide variety and amount of fresh produce items. Stripping farmers of these tools would be incredibly counterproductive and if we did that, we would soon be talking about Making America’s Fresh Produce Affordable Again. This is especially important for low-income Americans.
To read more about the MAHA report and CPDA’s response, you can find the CPDA Press Release here.
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